Contact info
Math Academy Online
PO Box 1337
Radford VA
24143 USA
Privacy Policy
The Platonic Realms web site does not currently request, obtain, or file any visitor-specific information without the visitor’s explicit permission. Any individual information obtained by permission is kept strictly confidential, unless its release is explicitly authorized by the individual. Platonic Realms uses session cookies to track visitor traffic, compiling aggregate information about the number of distinct visitors who visit each page and view each sponsor ad. These cookies time-out on the visitor's computer 60 minutes after the last request to our server, and are automatically deleted by the visitor's browser software.
History
The Math Academy Online™ / Platonic Realms™ web site was initiated by a small group of math and math education graduate students, led by B. Sidney Smith, the current president and editor-in-chief, at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1997. The site has grown slowly but steadily over the years, and now boasts a daily viewership of several thousand math students, educators, researchers, and amateurs from around the world.
Goals and Principles
From the start, as both educators and students ourselves, we were concerned to provide high-quality mathematical content for secondary-school and college students that was free, motivational, and instructional. To this end we have consistently sought ways to improve Platonic Realms for all of our visitors, listening to what our visitors had to tell us about the site and mastering new technologies as they come along to deliver the best content possible and in the best ways possible. During the period 2000 – 2001 we completely converted the site to Microsoft's Activer Server Page (ASP) technology, allowing us to deliver data-driven content that is fresh each day. Currently we are again redesigning the site use ASP.NET. We have consistently sought to avoid bombarding our visitors with the distractions and visual noise (from animated ads, etc.) that have so pulluted the internet since its introduction as a universal communications technology. Also, our privacy and content policies are very strict. Consequently, we have refused sponsorship from any organization whose products and services are not directly relevant to our visitors, or that is unable to respect our site-quality and privacy policies. For more sponsorship info, please see our Ad Info page.)
Current Offerings
The Platonic Realms Home Page delivers fresh math humor, quotes, historical notes, and mathematical challenges every day. We are currently working on expanding the database behind each of these features, so that visitors will experience as little repetition as possible. Our PRIME Math Encyclopedia is approaching 1,000 entries, with two dozen extended articles, and is growing fast with the help of associate editors from university math departments around the world. The Interactive Quotes Database is now fully data-driven, allowing searches by author, topic, and key-phrase. Our MiniTexts on such diverse topics as Math Anxiety and the Art of M.C. Escher have received world-wide recognition.
Future Plans
In addition to improving and extending the features already on offer, Platonic Realms will soon present book reviews and author interviews from the most recent titles in popular and educational mathematics. We hope to extend our multi-media offerings, eventually to include full video. Most importantly, Math Academy Online is destined to become the web's best source for online instruction, with instructional multi-media pages available free or at extremely low cost on topics from beginning and remedial mathematics to undergraduate calculus and beyond. This remains our chief goal, as it has from the beginning.
Thank you for visiting Platonic Realms, and please let us know if you have ideas about how we can improve the site for you and our other visitors.
About Sid
 Dr. B. Sidney Smith |